na na na na-na-na naaa, na-na-na naaa, hey jude

I am so so so so so so sooooo restless right now. Probably having more to do with lack of sleep and caffine overdoes than anything else. But. I really need to learn to deal with restlessness in a practical way instead of roving all over the place looking for something that will make me feel content again.

So I'm writing this to re-focus my thoughts on the things that are really important. I don't do this enough, I'm sure.

I've been thinking: it's so important to fall in love with Jesus. As totally new-age and charasmatic as that sounds. If it's something I devote myself to enough, there is no way I can come away from thinking, writing, and reading about Jesus without being completely excited about him. This is the baby I kind of threw out with the bath water when I decided I agreed with my church's more dry philosophies on worship. I can't just understand things on an intelecutal level or go through motions on a practical level. I've got to "invest" myself in it, give pieces of myself to it every day until I am lost in it.

So I'm trying to ask myself the question, what is it about God that I love? I mean, other than everything.

First of all I think it's phenominal that he loves me. This is interesting because I'm a girl and I want to be loved more than anything else, and I have the tendency to love those who love me. And while that may seem like a very selfish reason to love someone on a human level, God says that this is exactly how it works in his kingdom. He is willing to love me just so that I will love him, and somehow that saves my soul. I think this is really cool.

Also I think it's cool that God is a God of TRUTH. I hate it when Christians get so wrapped up in being conservative good people that they can't consider the potential truth to totally oposite theories, like evolution or even something as radical as atheism. It seems to me that God wants us to view things as honestly as we can and hopefully, if we devote enough time and energy to finding the answers, no matter what persepective we are comming from, we will figure out that the Bible is right. And then even come to understand and agree with the reasons why we intupret the Bible in certain ways. He doesn't want us to put blinders on and accept everything we read or that pastors or reformed Christians say. I feel very liberal saying all of that, but I think it's mostly right.

So I think those two reasons are enough to start off with. God is incredible and because of that the whole world has incredible meaning and purpose. I love meaning and purpose. I'm happy if I have it even when my heart is breaking, I think.

If that makes ANY sense.

I got accepted into Pierce college, so I can finally go choose classes now! I hope I get into some kind of an English class. I really wonder what it will be like going back to school. I'll probably hate it. But. Just one more year and I'll have something to show for all this work.

So...

We have a new reader around these parts. His name is Nathan Combs; some of you may remember him from his days at Emmanuel a loooong time ago. He now lives in California and he has a blog circle similar to ours except a bit smaller- I was thinking we could merge circles, perhaps. But I'll let you all negotiate arrangements with Nathan and his team members on your own. ;-)

Speaking of nerds (ops, did I say that? :-) I saw the first three X-man movies this weak and I'm completely in love with... *ahem* the movies. And Wolverine is pretty cool too. I feel a tiny flashback to my days of LOTR fandom in how much I liked those movies, especially the first two. It's kind of fun to be nerdy and stupid all over again. Does any one else share my sentiments here?

you keep comming back disasembled and I keep loosing this fight...

I think I know what I want my one word to be: Passionate.
I know I will never be the kind of person that can just live life, I will always be analizying and seeking meaning in every little thing. And I want to live to the fullest extent possible, but I'm not really sure what exactly it means to be passionate. I know that I have very very strong feelings about things, but it's got to be more than that...
It's so frusterating when you have in your head the perfect way for things to turn out, and it all seems so close and simple, but no one else is cooperating with your little plan. I don't understand why people do things like break up or change churches or move to the other side of the world... well, I do understand, but I wish so much it didn't happen. God is constantly asking me to surrender my dreams and accept his will, and I'm constantly trying to take them back which only causes more trouble for myself.
I just want it to be perfect. My childhood best friend is getting married in eleven days and at weddings people always seem perfect, like everything in their lives is for one tiny second all lined up and in place. Unfortunutly it never stays that way, and I can't stop crying about that fact.
Heaven has got to be wonderful.

if you get lost and loose yourself, what does it really mean?

I am on this new self-discovery kick.
I blame this on Christina because she is on a self-discovery kick, and while this may be pretty normal for think-too-hard-try-to-sound-smart-all-the-time me it's really unusual for sing-and-dance-your-way-through-life Christina. So it's a given that I would catch a more serious version of whatever it is that she has.

Suddenly it sounds really exciting to know who I am and what I'm good at and what I'm bad at and how this all fits into the big picture of my life. If I were a character in a book, how would I be potrayed? How do people perceive me when we first meet- how do my best friends think of me? If there was one word to sum up the essence of who I am, what would it be?

I've been doing that for my friends lately. Of course everyone will have a different take on any one person, but they probably fall in the same general direction. I see Beth as being romantic, my dad as patient, Christina as cheerful and Jacob as loyal, Lindy as artistic, Kacy as optimistic, Dan as knowledgable. Then there are people who are so intricate and complex they are impossible to pin down in one word- like Danny, Anna, and Michaela. There are also those about whom I just don't know enough to say.

And even within the people I think are very straight forward and easy to understand, there are layers and unexpected hills and mines, all steming from the same core identity. Beth may be romantic but I know she can also be remakrably cool-headed and practical, which may seem like the antithisis of romantic but they both fit together without conflict inside her personality. These things confuse me. I'm realizing that the years I've spent pigion-holeing people into personality groups were not helpful in enabling me to understand people. People are very, very complex. I'm not even totally sure it's safe for me to even make these statements about individuals.

Obviously people like knowing who they are though, as thousands of facebook and myspace quizes will testify. I think it's helpful when people tell me things about myself- I always think long and hard about what they say. The problem is we're usually too afraid of offending, or sometimes, we feel the truth would be too harsh to share. I think it's good to know, though. Otherwise we'd just get stuck in a rut and we'd never change at all.

Fictional characters are a very interesting reflection of the way we see people. First and formost they are always consistent with themselves. It's very inspiring. The brave girl is always brave and the timid sister is always timid.

When I'm writing up characters I usually have a very definite idea of what the essense of this character will be, but from that point there are SO many different directions I could take him/her. One girl who is supposed to be tough goes from being an emo with a broken heart to a major sports fanatic to a hip hop dancer to a Christian girl with bad social skills in the space of a few weeks, and I rotate between having her be pale and beautiful and super skinny to bouncy and freckled with currly hair without ever really noticing, to me she stays exactly the same in the way that I know her. It's when I try to nail her down as just one thing that I tend to get frusterated. And this is the same journey that I go on with myself, trying to figure out exactly who I am.

I'll let you know when I've got it completely figured out.

and it's still only noon.

It's really hard to write about some things without sounding really up-tight and better-than-thou, or conversely too flippant or insincere. How can I convey to people my values and the things that are really important without giving them impressions that will turn them off to it? It's certainly a relevent challenge, something I would love to overcome someday. I think Donald Miller does this very well in his books. He talks about God, but is still very real about his own raw human-ness. I want to write like that someday.

But as I've been talking myself through my frustration with people who think they know too much about what they beleive, I think I'm figuring something out. I guess I always thought the problem was with people who make big leaps of faith to beleive in God and the Bible (good thing), and then just start deducting things from there in a if-this-is-true-that-must-also-be-true kind of way (bad thing). Like, well, I beleive in God, I beleive in the Bible- the Bible says to keep the Sabbath day holy- THEREFORE: I will not play cards on Sunday. When really that seems like the biggest leap of faith of all of them, except this time the faith is in your own ability to translate the scriptures correctly rather than in outside revelation.

Does this make sense? What I'm realizing is that our faith shouldn't be in our own ability to translate the scriptures correctly, it should be in God's ability to establish the truth through the scriptures. If I say that we can't know something for sure so we should stop trying to enforce our standards on other people, then what I'm really saying is, "I don't think God made that clear enough for us to actually beleive it." Sometimes that might be the case, but most often it's not. The Bible is completely sufficient to guide us through our daily lives, with no exceptions. I can know what I beleive and stand for it unwaveringly. I like that.

"Might I have a lock of your black tresses?" "But I don't have any black dresses!" "I meant your hair."

Some things I've been realizing...

1. I have no right to complain about my job. Not only am I extreemly blessed to even have a job right now, but this is a good job that pays well, suits my schedule perfectly, is very low stress, doesn't involve any questionable situations, and keeps me fufilling the God-given ordinence of work five days a week. My co-workers are nice, reasonable people who don't swear or anything like that.

And with that, just because I'm not having fun doesn't mean I have a right to be miserable. I need to stop viewing life as a hay ride designed for my enjoyment. I need to stop determining the value of experiences by how much I enjoyed them; I want to take myself out of myself so that I don't even think about it.

2. It is not my place to question the future. God will work things out. I have all these doubts about weather I'm doing the right thing in going to New York (did I mention I might go to New York to be a nanny?) or not going to school, but really I have come to the place in my life because of different circumstances and even when those circumstances had to do with my own failures, they MUST have been for a reason. I just need to keep pushing forward, making decisions with the best wisdom and judgement I can find at the time, and trust that God will guide me even through my faulty human choices.

I guess what I mean by that is that even though I don't know if God wants me to go to New York or not, I really want to go to New York and by all appearences it looks like the oprotunity of a lifetime, so I should go. I shouldn't sit around hemming and hawing, waiting for a flashing red sign. Same with other decisions in my life. I'm so reluctant to move, sometimes, I'll just sit in these ruts doubting and worrying. Really I think it should be simple to follow a path that is upright and sensible, without needing to hesitate around every corner. Although prayer is enormously helpful and a very good thing, too, because somehow I'm sure God will make everything clearer.

3. Jacob-inspired: Prayer is a tool. I never use it as a tool, I use it as a way to communicate with God and as a spiritual dicapline, but not really as a tool. I mean, I will pray that God would help me in this task or that task or keep me safe or that he would make me more like him, and I do pray for my friends in a general way, but I don't think my prayers ever have much real faith in them. Take my family, for instance. We're not perfect and a lot of times we're downright disfunctional, and it occured to me (when Jacob pointed it out, haha) that I never really beleive that I can change things with prayer. I read the story of David and Goliath last night and I was really astounded at the amount of faith David had. To say with such confidence that he KNEW God wouldn't let his armies fall... I could never say that. I wish I had a sliver of that kind of faith in my prayers. I can only imagine the difference it would make if I did.

4. I've also been thinking about my perception of God, because I've been reading through I Samuel and sometimes I feel like I've been slapped across the face because of the God that I find there. He seems totally different from Jesus or the loving God that is described in the Psalms. He commands the Isrealites to masacre whole communities, right down to the babies, and once he turned his back on Saul and was going to utterly destroy his life just because of one mistake. I know it's justice, but it throws me. It really really upsets me. I find that I don't want to serve a God like that and a lot of times I'm not serving a God like that, I'm serving someone who is all love and wants only peace, the God of the hippies.

I think it's so important to get out of this rut of viewing God as one thing or the other. C.S. Lewis talks about this in the Screwtape Letters. We need to pray to someone that is REAL, instead of someone who is a picture on a wall or a vauge imaginary creature floating way up in space. The more I realize how little I really know about that person, perhaps the more I will realize that he's real, that he's actually listening to me and to thousands of other people at the same time. My expectations of him are based on something, and that something has to be sinful because they are false expectations and God is perfect.

5. This isn't so much a realization... but I'm stick of just talking about making a difference. I want to start something that sends money to somewhere important once a month. Any ideas?

How do we know that the Bible is inerent and ultimately authoritative?

Lucy, I'm counting primarily on you here. :-)